Lucent Technologies 9400, 8400 manual TCP/IP Networks, ATM Networks

DEFINITY Enterprise Communications Server Release 8.2	Issue 1
Overview 555-233-002	April 2000
System Overview
DEFINITY ECS Network Connections	10

TCP/IP Networks

DEFINITY ECS can also connect to Ethernet Local Area Networks (LANs) and the Internet.

■The optional DEFINITY LAN Gateway feature lets the DEFINITY system exchange messages with LAN communications software.

■DEFINITY ECS now supports Internet Protocol (IP) trunks using the TN802B circuit pack and C-LAN card (TN799B). However, to connect to the network and do signaling over IP, only the TN799B is required.

IP trunking is a good choice for basic, corporate voice and fax communications, where cost is a major concern. IP-trunk calls travel over a company’s intranet rather than the Public Telephone Network. So, for the most common types of internal, corporate communications, IP trunks offer considerable savings.

IP trunking is usually not a good choice for applications where calls have to be routed to multiple destinations (as in most conferencing applications) or to a voice messaging system. IP-trunk calls are compressed to save network bandwidth. Repeated compression and decompression results in a loss of data at each stage and degrades the final quality of the signal. This is not a problem in normal, corporate voice or fax calls. They go through two or three compression cycles at most. But multipoint conference calls and most voice messaging systems add too many compression cycles for acceptable quality.

■DEFINITY ECS now includes the IP Solutions feature, which supports audio and voice transmissions over a LAN or WAN. For more information about IP Solutions, see ‘‘IP Solutions’’ on page 56.

ATM Networks

Three kinds of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) connectivity are available with DEFINITY ECS. Any standards-compliant ATM switch can serve as the switch node connecting DEFINITY ECS port networks. In this type of configuration, the ATM switch replaces the Center-Stage Switch.

The three kinds of ATM connectivity DEFINITY ECS supports are as follows:

■ATM Port Network Connectivity (ATM-PNC) provides an alternative to either the direct-connect or Center Stage Switch configurations for connecting the Processor Port Network (PPN) to one or more Expansion Port Networks (EPNs). ATM-PNC provides reduced infrastructure cost and improved network manageability.